Richard R. Nelson 1930–2025
纪念演化经济学奠基人理查德·纳尔逊，回顾其从主流经济学转向开创演化经济理论、强调技术与创新驱动经济变革的学术生涯。
Richard R. (Dick) Nelson passed away on January 29, 2025, at the age of 94. The loss for the academic community at large and for the ICC community is enormous. Throughout his long career, Dick Nelson has always addressed fundamental economic questions. Indeed, in the early part of that career, he used quite conventional interpretative tools, producing a large set of important publications in top mainstream journals. However, he soon realized that the standard theory was inadequate to address such questions. In the 1970s and early 1980s, together with Chris Freeman and Sid Winter, he built the foundations of a new paradigm that set the basis for modern evolutionary theory and the evolutionary approach to economics and economic change. His co-authored book with Sid Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Harvard University Press, 1982), introduced a radically new perspective in which: (1) technology and innovation were seen as the drivers of economic change; (2) learning, knowledge, and capabilities are fundamental; (3) routines play a central role in the behavior of firms and provide continuity in the industrial system, while (4) innovation and competition drive the selection process among different economic agents and (5) economic growth is the result of evolutionary processes of learning, selection, industrial dynamics, and structural change.